Jerry Fodor

Whatever, you may be wondering, became of the mind-body problem? This new collection of Colin McGinn’s philosophical papers is as good a place to find out as any I know of. Published over a period of more than a decade, and drawn together from the usual motley of largely inaccessible academic journals, these essays provide a vivid introduction to current views in the philosophy of mind and to their immediate precursors. Professionals will find, in the earlier publications (which, confusingly, come last in the book), a fascinating record of what happened to the philosophy of mind in England when Davidson and Kripke hit town. Professionals and laity alike will find, in the later publications, an up-to-date, sophisticated and enjoyably tendentious account of the present state of the art.

The Modern era, as analytic philosophers reckon, started with Descartes. By contrast, the Recent era started when philosophy, in Richard Rorty’s phrase, took the ‘linguistic turn’. So it started with Frege or Russell, or early Wittgenstein, or the Vienna Circle; take your pick. Modern philosophy was mostly about epistemology: it wanted to understand what makes knowledge possible. Recent philosophy is mostly about meaning (or ‘content’) and wants to understand what makes thought and language possible. So, anyhow, we tell our undergraduates when we’re in a hurry.

A dialectic of two different and opposed conceptions of Naturalism is working itself out in Mind and World. There’s the reductionist version – John McDowell calls it ‘bald’ Naturalism; ‘Scientism’ is another pejorative currently in fashion. And there’s the kind of naturalistic pluralism that McDowell himself is striving for. Very roughly the distinction is between the tradition that runs from Kant through the Positivists to the likes of Dewey and Quine, and the tradition that runs from Kant through the Hegelians to Wittgenstein, Rorty, Davidson and Hilary Putnam since he left MIT for Harvard.’

‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ ‘Practice, practice.’ Here’s a different way: start anywhere you like and take a step at random. If it’s a step in the right direction, I’ll say ‘warmer’; in which case repeat the process from your new position. If I say ‘colder’, go back a step and repeat from there. This is a kind of procedure that they call ‘hill climbing’ in the computer-learning trade (hence, I suppose, the title of Richard Dawkins’s new book). It’s guaranteed to get you where you’re going so long as the distance between is finite. (And so long as there are no insurmountable obstacles or ‘local maxima’ in the way: nothing is perfect.)

What’s your favourite metaphor for minds? If you’re an empiricist, or an associationist, or a connectionist, you probably favour webs, networks, switchboards, or the sort of urban grid where the streets are equidistant and meet at right angles: New York’s Midtown, rather than its Greenwich Village. Such images suggest a kind of mind every part of which is a lot like every other. Take a sample here and you find the concept dog associated to the concepts cat and animal; take a sample there and you find the concepts Antony and Cleopatra in close connection. Though mental content changes as you go from place to place in the web, the structure is everywhere the same. It’s concepts and connections wherever you look.